Colonel Roosevelt (40 page)

REGULAR REPUBLICANS WHO
had always considered the Colonel to be one of their number reacted to his candidacy with varying degrees of perplexity. The most common theory was that he had lost touch with reality. Senator
Root thought that he was motivated by vainglory. “
He aims at a leadership far in the future, as a sort of Moses and Messiah for a vast progressive tide of rising humanity.”

Henry Cabot Lodge wrote Roosevelt, “
I never thought that any situation could arise which would have made me so miserably unhappy as I have been during the past week.” He blamed himself for not realizing how long they had been at political odds. Now that Roosevelt had embraced judicial recall as a campaign theme, Lodge felt he could remain silent no longer. He had given a statement to the press. “It is at least honest although it gives no expression to the pain and unhappiness which lie behind it.”

“
My dear fellow,” Roosevelt consoled him, “you could not do anything that would make me lose my warm personal affection for you. For a couple of years I have felt that you and I were heading opposite ways as regards internal politics.”

President Taft told Archie Butt that Roosevelt was delusional if he thought he could control the forces of anarchy he had unleashed. “
He will either be a hopeless failure if elected or else destroy his own reputation by becoming a socialist, being swept there by the force of circumstances just as the leaders of the French Revolution were swept on and on.”

Butt listened to the President ramble, as he had listened for three years, and decided to take a vacation. Divided in his loyalty to both candidates, he had no stomach to see them heading into a contest that had all “the irresistible force of a Greek drama.” With Taft’s permission, he booked himself a passage to Europe.

“
If the old ship goes down,” he wrote his sister, “you will find my affairs in shipshape condition.”

THE ENERGY OF
the progressive movement, now that Roosevelt had committed to it, was explosive.
By early March, the three main hubs of his campaign organization were staffed, financed, and running. The Executive Committee, chaired by Senator Dixon, operated out of New York, from a rapidly expanding
“skyscraper suite” on the twenty-fourth floor of the Metropolitan Life tower. When Roosevelt visited, he could look down on the decaying town house, three blocks south, where he had been born. Generally he stayed away, preferring to hold court in his office at
The Outlook
, one block east. He told reporters he was content to leave the direction of the campaign to Dixon and Frank Knox, as vice chairman. The rest of the executive team consisted of hardened professional politicians—none harder than former congressman William L. Ward of New York, a manufacturer of nuts, bolts, and rivets, and William “Big Bill” Flinn of Pittsburgh, a power player set on dismantling Pennsylvania’s reactionary Republican machine.

At the Congress Hotel in Chicago, Truman H. Newberry, Roosevelt’s former navy secretary, assumed the vital role of treasurer of the National Committee. A millionaire local merchant, Alexander H. Revell, served as overall chairman, commuting to executive meetings in New York. In Washington, Frank Munsey gave space in his own press building—and
a $50,000 startup budget—to the Roosevelt propaganda bureau.
^*
Its manager was Cal O’Laughlin, who had come a long way in politics since waylaying the Colonel on the Nile. The bureau operated under the ideological control of Gifford and Amos Pinchot, James Garfield, and Medill McCormick—all of them thankful to be free of their obligations to La Follette. Another former journalist who joined the campaign was O. K. Davis of
The New York Times
. He attached himself to Senator Dixon as a pen for hire.

Branch offices opened in thirty other states, from New Hampshire west to California, and North Dakota south to Louisiana. Only the most reactionary corners of the old Confederacy, and the flintiest extremes of Republican New England, were deemed beyond the reach of new ideas. Wisconsin was ceded to La Follette, who could count on being nominated there, if nowhere else. Roosevelt’s eight original gubernatorial backers chaired their respective state committees.

The case that Dixon (dark, smooth-shaven, intense, and tireless) decided to present to rank-and-file Republicans was that three years of Taft’s leadership had reduced the Party to near impotence. The President had managed to turn a GOP majority of sixty in the House of Representatives into a minority of seventy, and a two-to-one overbalance of power in the Senate into virtual equipoise. His blindly supportive National Committee had lost control of a dozen states in the North and West. He was perceived as well-intentioned but weak; his obsessive traveling looked more like running away than reaching out. Whatever his support among the editors of loyal Republican periodicals, Dixon pointed out, reporters and cartoonists everywhere
mocked him as long-winded, lazy, and obese. To Woodrow Wilson or whatever other falcon the Democrats might uncap this summer, Taft was easy meat.

Roosevelt, in contrast, was leading Taft by more than 66 percent in regional popularity polls across the country. According to the same surveys, he had more potential votes than all the other presidential contenders combined. But the goodwill of ordinary Americans counted for little at this stage of the political process. Only six states offered direct, preferential primaries: California, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In the remaining forty-two, delegates were selected, rather than elected, by the state parties in caucuses or conventions. And since these proceedings were controlled by bosses, or manipulated by sit-pat officeholders in favor of the
status quo
, they were democratic shams.

“
You understand, my dear fellow,” Roosevelt wrote Newberry, “that probably Taft will be nominated. This is not a thing we can say in public, because of course such a statement discourages men; but I am in this fight purely for a principle, win or lose.”

Unfortunately, that principle was now perceived to be the recall of judicial decisions, rather than the broad “Charter of Democracy” he had tried to present at Columbus. Senator Dixon’s long-term strategy was to recommunicate, through the Washington propaganda bureau, the progressive content of the rest of that speech. It would serve as a campaign platform, and—if the Colonel would only shut up about judges—recall would have faded as an issue by June.

In the short term, Dixon wanted to persuade as many caucus-convention states as possible to adopt the popular selection of delegates, while there was still time for legislative action. Seven of them—Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota—were seen as amenable to primaries, thanks to parallel lobbying by the progressive arm of the Democratic Party. If they fell in line, Roosevelt could count on perhaps ten large delegations pledged to him. The number of delegates admitted to the national convention was 1,078, meaning that a consensus of 540 votes would clinch the nomination. His mass appeal might yet achieve that miracle. And there was always the chance (though no gentleman would think of mentioning it) that the President, at 330 pounds plus, might take one golf swing too many.

NEITHER TAFT NOR ROOSEVELT
undertook to campaign personally at first. Tradition required major candidates to remain aloof from delegate-hunting. The Colonel contented himself with press relations.
One day he allowed two of the investigative journalists he had slammed as “muckrakers” during his presidency to buy him lunch at the Colony Club in New York. Ida Tarbell,
who had made herself famous by exposing the monopolistic practices of the Standard Oil Company, was by no means his fan. She had not forgiven him for his epithet, which had stuck to her ever since. Ray Stannard Baker knew Roosevelt well enough to doubt that he was as pure in his progressivism as Senator La Follette—or for that matter Governor Wilson, with whom Baker was now ideologically infatuated.

Both writers, however, were captivated by the Colonel’s charm. His political image was so swashbuckling and his quoted rhetoric so pugnacious that skeptics were always surprised to find how gentle he was in private. “Again he impressed me with his wonderful social command,” Baker wrote afterward. There were two other women present, along with William Allen White, and Roosevelt showed himself to be “keenly sensitive to everyone in the party,” bringing out all personalities. It was not possible to be shy in front of him. He disarmed by being frank about himself, not hiding the fact that he had been snubbed by the Harvard overseers, and admitting that some people considered him crazy.

Baker thought that he looked “wonderfully well,” sitting relaxed in a soft dark suit and bright tie. The light through the club’s big windows shone on his straw-brown hair and showed it to be thinning slightly at the crown. There was little gray in it, in contrast to streaks of white in his mustache. In his sharp voice, he talked about his career, saying that as a young man he had felt most comfortable with fellow members of the Knickerbocker aristocracy. Later he had come to admire self-made men like Mark Hanna, who made fortunes in industry and parlayed it into political power, until their amorality repelled him and he had realized that “the real democratic spirit lay deeper,” in the bosoms of the plain people he had bunked with out West, and fought with in Cuba.

Baker sensed that Roosevelt’s conscious adoption of their values had, over the years, become visceral. “This is his strong point—that he voices rather than creates the sentiment which he expresses. He is not a pioneer, but a reporter.” As such, he did not seem to care if he won or not, as long as “the great fundamental principles” of progressivism prevailed.

The only prejudice he displayed during two hours of conversation was a refusal to accept that La Follette was as idealistic as himself. Baker had to conclude, “He is nearer the
true liberal
in spirit than any man now in public life … a great man—a genius in his way.”

MEANWHILE, ROOSEVELT’S AGENTS
fought for every delegate who could be cajoled, bullied, or bribed. It was an embarrassment to him that
men like Ward and Flinn, bosses themselves, were employing methods contemptuous of his pronouncement at Saratoga in 1910, “The rule of the boss is the negation
of democracy.” Every Pennsylvanian ward heeler looking for a new job in a new machine, every Southern Negro who yielded to the
charms of Ormsby McHarg, Dixon’s none-too-scrupulous representative in Dixie, shrugged at what the Colonel had to say about righteousness.

The problem was that, no matter how honest most of his campaign executives were in command of their various field operations, they had to rely on professional politicians at the state and lower levels—when such men could be found. Often as not, “Republicans for Roosevelt” were passionate amateurs who had never worked in a campaign before, and who needed to be trained and supervised. In Massachusetts, he was served by a committee of
seven Harvard men, all from families dating back to the seventeenth century, all young, and all except one possessed by the notion that progressivism was a form of
noblesse oblige
. But with Senator W. Murray Crane controlling the Bay State GOP organization (for as long as Lodge recused himself), the Harvard men were as rowers without a cox: all muscle, but no coordination.